Tag Archives: Wiregrass Technical College

These 1.0 megawatts (MW) of solar panels across from the old closed Evergreen Landfill will soon feed
the new Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP)
a short distance up the same Wetherington Road.
To get the electricity there, a power line will either have to be bored underground
or put on poles overhead; that’s as yet undecided.

Photo: John S. Quarterman for LAKE, 25 July 2017

Another solar field, started a couple of weeks ago, will be on land right to the WWTP, for another 275 KW.

Tom Fanning, our genial CEO host,
said some things I’ve never heard him say before like
Southern Company is
“pivoting towards wind”
and SO’s board soon has to decide whether to go forward with Plant Vogtle
“or not” probably by August.
Fanning gets the
first and
last word in this blog post,
plus a complete transcript of what
I asked and
Tom Fanning’s response,
along with summaries of the other questions and answers.

Please hear me!
I think renewables are exceedingly important in the future.
— Tom Fanning, CEO, Southern Company

Atlanta — Commissioner Ron Jackson today informed the state
board that oversees the Technical College System of Georgia that Dr.
Tina Anderson, who is currently the president of Moultrie Technical
College, is his choice to become the next president of Wiregrass
Georgia Technical College in Valdosta.

Board Member Ben Copeland of Valdosta made the motion to approve the
appointment of Anderson to the position, and the full board voted
unanimously in favor of the selection. The announcement and vote
were made during the board’s monthly meeting at the TCSG
headquarters in Atlanta.

Anderson will move into her new position at Wiregrass Georgia
Technical College on July 1. She will replace Dr. Ray Perren, who
left the college in May to become president of another TCSG college,
Lanier Technical College in Oakwood, Georgia.

While I agree with most of
Karen Noll’s post,
especially the part about CUEE should come clean about why it’s spending
so much money on something about which it knows little,
I don’t agree that consolidating high schools would help.

I remember when Lowndes County consolidated two high schools into one, and the rationale was cost saving and more resources for science classes. What it was really about was football.
And it worked: Lowndes High School now often wins the state championship,
and Valdosta hasn’t in a decade.
While education lags behind.

The center “will educate a person to work in an advanced manufacturing
plant,” Gilley says, just the kind of plants that are coming to Troup
County over the next year or so. Using industry-standard equipment,
students will be educated to meet the manufacturing community’s
workforce needs.

In fact, the manufacturing community already is calling on the
center. DaeLim, a supplier to Kia and Hyundai (the latter has a plant
nearby in Alabama), expressed interest in students doing prototyping of
plastic parts once the center, which opened June 1, is up and running.

“We’ve left a good platform on which to build. We have good faculty,
good staff. I think we have good community relations,” Gilley says of
his time at West Georgia. Then he looks to the future and what he’ll
miss most about his job. “We offer programs that allow people to get
better paying jobs. I’ll miss having the power to make decisions that
change people’s lives.”

Hm, so the locals think the technical college has more to do with
industry than the K-12 schools.

It’s an opportunity for those of us who are not currently
searching for our next meal to help those who need jobs,
and thereby to help ourselves, so they don’t turn to crime.
Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession
greener than ever, if we choose wisely.

Switchgrass seemed like a good idea five or ten years ago,
but there is still no market for it.

Not just strictly organic by Georgia’s ridiculously
restrictive standards for that, but also less pesticides
for healthier foods, pioneered as nearby as Tifton.
That’s two markets: one for farmers, stores, and farmers’ markets
in growing and distributing healthy food, and one for local
banks in financing farmers converting from their overlarge
pesticide spraying machinery to plows and cultivators.

Similarly, biomass may have seemed like a good idea years ago,
but with Adage backing out of both of its Florida biomass plants
just across the state line, having never built any such plant ever,
the biomass boom never happened.